don't try to draw too many real world analogies...
on
Who Protects the Internet?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't think you want to centralize anything like that, at least not to the exclusion of everyone having local protections. Your firewall is under your control and you can make it as secure or unsecured as you want it.
If you want the cyberspace equivalent of a national army, you're just asking to have lots of power taken away from you and given to someone else. That being said, I think there is a case for prevention of nations attacking other nations en large, or 'war by other means'.
but carry it too far and you end up destroying the global feel of the internet - you'll end up with cyber borders as bad as our real borders - checkpoints you can't cross without 'your papers please'.
There's no way he was looking for a land speed record location near there. It's one of the most mountainous areas in the country. he may have started in the flats of Nevada, but he went over one mountain range and was skimming the peaks of another when he went down.
I backpacked in and camped about 5 miles north of that spot last year at Thousand Island Lake. He crashed at 10,000 feet up, which is nearing the limits for a small plane with unpressurized cockpit. If you make a wrong move and don't manage your energy right, you're dead, and there's nowhere to land safely. Likely it was too late by the time he realized he was in it too far and wasn't going to get back out.
The scenery up there is spectacular though, about a mile from his crash site is the Minarets and Minaret Lake, one of many alpine lakes that dot the Sierra range. There are backpacking trails nearby, but not on that particular very steep mountain side.
Probably the most annoying side effect of digital tuners. It has to find the stream and begin to decode it. Your old TV changed channels instantly because it was an analog tuner with pre-set frequency decoding for each channel position. The TV did no thinking, it simply is looking at a different frequency on the receiver and de-modulating it into the CRT, and all of that happens at the speed of light.
Newer tuners are all digital, and while you generally get better picture quality even on analog channels, it has to capture the analog or digital transmission, decode it / encode it and then pass it on to the LCD display. Typically there's some 'start time' involved in this. I expect that particular feature will be a selling point to differentiate TVs in the future, once they've run out of other things and the tuner hardware becomes more powerful.
BEos and it's original hardware was the last, best hope for a solid, no B.S. modern computer that was re-designed from scratch for maximum performance with pre-emtpive multitasking.
I see it as a chicken and egg problem. The barrier to entry in the OS market is extremely tough because software manufacturers won't invest the time in porting their apps unless the hardware or OS is established, and that can't happen without the software. The OS market is well beyond it's infancy now, not that it's a good thing.
The way I see it, it would have to get much, much worse than it is now for companies like Adobe to say "hey, lets throw our weight behind this new OS/Platform." For example, if MS completely bungled Windows 7, or whatever they are calling it these days. Two failed OS's in a row, and maybe it will finally make a dent in their market share. And I don't much like apple because their hardware prices remain artifically high, due to them being the sole provider for both OS and hardware. It doesn't help that MS also makes the world standard of office suites. They will always push their own OS with it first.
The competitiveness of the PC hardware market is excellent, and many previously frustrating compatiblity issues have gone away with the advent of newer motherboards and slot standards, narrowing the hardware quality control and consistency between PC hardware and Mac hardware.
PC hardware with a new OS would be great. Apple understandibly wants to control the hardware that Mac OSX runs on, because it's much easier to assure qualtiy and provide support that way. But that support comes at a cost. What we need is an OS that runs on generic hardware that is written from scratch for lean performance, by neither of those two vendors.
My later Amigas typically had a boot time of 10 seconds. Full blown AmigaOS on an internal HD on the A3000. I miss them dearly.
We've managed to stav off the usefulness of moore's law by creating the world's worst software to run on them.
It's not fair to judge modern systems with those older ones however; we ask a lot more of our software and our GUI's than we once did. But there is no excuse in the way that windows configures itself by default, it sets itself up for failure by having a re-sizable swap partition on the main OS partition.
When I install Windows on a new PC, I always create 3 partitions: An inner partition of 5 - 10 GB for a fixed size swap file only, then an OS partition, then an applications partition, and defrag regularly. I can keep my machines going for many years without much performance degradation in this manner.
Even if you are scrupulous, bad software and bad uninstall jobs will eventually bloat out your system a little bit.
A little common sense goes a long way, unfortunately those who do not deal with computers for a living aren't going to know these little tips and tricks, and will continue to be frustrated. OS manufacturers, in particular windows need to set up a default OS install for success, not failure. Software manufacturers need to create very clean installs and uninstall routines. Unfortunately this is not always possible in the OS environment. It's a joint effort.
The tin-foil hatters will think that M$ is doing this on purpose so people will feel compelled to upgrade more frequently, but I don't really give them that much conniving intelligence.
I think they saw the sucess of the eposodic half life releases and went with that. You can shorten the time between releases and keep the genre fresh without the fans having to wait five years.
The Valve folks have admitted that the half life episodes are basically HL3 when put together, and done like that for the reasons stated above. I have enjoyed playing the episodes as they come out, and for those who aren't playing them, you can be sure there will be a nicely priced special with all three episodes run back to back as a single game.
With the HL2 episodes, each one is $20. It will be interesting to see what the Starcraft games end up costing. It sounds like the Starcraft games will be much broader than the short HL episodes, in that case they would be justified in charging more for each one. It doesn't matter how many games they put out, I will pay for a good game, as long as the price is relevant to the amount of gameplay you get out of it.
has anyone tried running XP with no swap, playing games, etc? Do you even need it for photoshop, since it has it's own scratch files that you can define?
what I always do is partition a new disk with a small inner partition, and put nothing but the windows swap file there. Since it's the fastest part of the disk it seems to make sense. Then I have the windows system partition, and then a program files partition. This seems to prevent excessive disk seek, and XP systems I build are still zippy a few years later.
I also make the swap file a fixed size, and yes I use that old rule of thumb of double the RAM, since no one has given a good reason NOT to. Although it would be great just to not use a swap file, but I hear Windows likes to have one, even if it has plenty of RAM.
With Photoshop, I created an inner partition on my RAID just for Pshop scratch disks.
Good memories....Ultima V and Autoduel
on
Dungeons and Desktops
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I am glad to hear that he is broad minded enough to include Autoduel, which breaks from the traditional fantasy theme.
For a long time I thought that Ultima V was the best Ultima ever made. Then I met someone else who shared that opinion and then knew that I may not be crazy. Ultima IV was also not far behind, or at least it's equal. That's probably why a group of people went through great pains to recreate Ultima V using the dungeon seige engine. (see this link for info.)
A lot of the other games mentioned I remember playing on the C=64, Amiga, Apple II and PC. Another good one is Sentinel Planets. That was a hybrid space combat / planetary exploration game with EGA graphics on the PC. Probably one of the first PC games that was vaguely well done.
I do disagree with the assessment of Diablo. It sounds to me like he turns a nose up at diablo because it emphasizes action more than the roleplaying aspect. In comparison to his favorite, Baldurs Gate, it is a completely different game. Personally, I enjoy the more action based games myself, mostly due to a lack of time and brain power to want to do anything else after a long work day. Just a sign of getting older I suppose. The Diablo games and Starcraft are the perfect balance. You can jump in, have a good game and put it away for a while.
Yep, commodore didn't need any help running itself into the ground, between Irving Gould and the caustic atmosphere created by Jack Tramiel that was not sustainable past the initial success of the C=64.
I owned and used heavily every single model of Amiga released to the united states, and wound up in the effects industry as a result. The amount of stuff that was possible on that machine compared to all others at the time was astounding. Thank you Jay Miner and also Newtek.
Anyway, despite the numerous failings of Microsoft Products, you can't argue with success. Success in this case came with a huge compromise to quality, but later OSs such as Win2k and WinXP were actually quite stable and usable, warts and all. Sure, there were many better and much more pure OS's out there (I would like to have seen BEOS take off, especially in combination with the BEOS hardware) but the chicken and egg problem came into play...users say great platform but where's the software? Software developers: We'll port our software when people adopt the platform. In a mature industry it's hard to overcome inertia. If the Amiga had been handled correctly in 1986, it had the chance to be a serious contender.
But things are the way they are and life goes on. At least we have moore's law in processor speed to make up for the horrendous inefficiencies and bloat in Microsoft's OSs. Lets hope their next OS takes a different direction than Vista, by defaulting to a light footprint unless you want to add to it.
till one of these giant datacenters has an electrical fault like the one last weekend, and instead of 9,000 servers, it's 90,000 servers gone at once...
I live in the Edwards Air Force Base restricted air space, so we here many sonic booms in any given week, mostly from small fighter jets. In every instance the double boom is clearly audible, unless it's a tail-less spacecraft like SpaceShipOne. Whenever we hear a single boom, it is blasting going on at the nearby CalPortland Cement Plant limestone quarry or the gold mine.
Sometimes the booms are so loud the windows shake and things rattle around. We all love it because that's why we're here. But reducing the boom signature is an important area of research, so 'normal' folks can have supersonic airliners going overhead without disturbing their chiuahua's sleep patterns. That's why the concord only flew ocean routes. It would be nice to have supersonic transport between LA and New York.
The difference between a flying car and a roadable airplane is that a roadable airplane is more airplane than car. It is designed to land and get you a short distance to a nearby destination at relatively slow speeds. It is also more delicate on the ground than a regular car. The upside is that as an airplane, its functionality is mostly preserved. The concept of a Roadable Airplane is closer to the truth as far as what will actually work.
Building roadable airplanes is all about minimizing the weight sacrifice in adding the extra stuff it takes to fold the wings and make it steer and propel itself down the road. It's a very tough compromise. Aircraft engines are designed to run at fixed RPMs, they are not suitable for driving a transmission. Thus you're either adding a very small second engine or using a hydraulic motor or something similar. Again, more weight.
Beware prototypes that show very fancy automatic folding wings and other gadgetry - they are likely to never be practical in real life due to the added weight. The goal is to keep it simple and light.
There has been a problem in the industry of folks overpromising and under-delivering. It's a difficult problem that won't be solved with Popular Science cover art. It's easy to dismiss roadable airplanes as fantasy, but it's not an insurmountable engingeering problem, it just requires a lot of difficult work. It's been done before for real (Molt Taylor Aerocar) and it will be done again.
But yes, in the mean time, it's ok to continue to say "Where's my flying car?!?!?!";)
Good find. My first job in HS was at Atari playtesting video games for the Tengen system. (I knew someone who worked there as a 'game councelor' on their help line, a fellow Amiga fanatic, ironically)
It's not surprising that the roms turned up there - it's close to Milpitas. Usually I say there's nothing more to be had at flea markets - all the vendors these days are selling various combinations of the same grey market goods from Asia...but every now and then I guess there's still a gem.
It would be nice to see a blanket or low cost system for amateur short form video makers that post to YouTube and the likes. It would allow people who make AMVs and other short videos to use commercial music, so long as the videos are not sold directly for profit. Websites like YouTube would be allowed to host them (and make money off of advertising) in exchange for this. Perhaps a low blanket fee paid for by the ISP, or paid per individual per use. (but it would have to be very reasonable.)
Right now it is impossible for the average joe to license a Bon Jovi song for his home-made video. The industry is missing out on some cash flow and great publicity by not looking at this market.
I think it should be permanently 'sprung forward' so we get more light in the evening. Otherwise useless to us non-morning people. Bah! (image of Catbert holding rolled up newspaper)
I took one out last week with a horizontal saw with a fine pitch blade for cutting hard metal.
I sawed directly through the middle of the platter, cutting through the motor. It made a very neat cutaway study. Might make some art with it, dunno. It was also fun to watch.
Yea. They're only poor quality because people were only trying to surpass their current playback rate. If they had said before the original video was being stored, people would have run higher data rates and resolutions. Sigh.
That would be nice as well. People upload longer videos anyway, they just split them up and it's real annoying to have to deal with that. I think they're trying to prevent lots of people uploading full length programs. Hollyweird probably likes that too since that makes it harder to upload full length TV shows. Not that I'd want to watch anything of value at such crap resolution, and honestly, for more than 10 minutes at a stretch.;) But introduce higher quality, and I think longer format programs would do better.
More access rarely results in more, better videos. Like anything else, a few good ones rise to the top. Fortunately, we don't have to watch the crappy ones.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you want to centralize anything like that, at least not to the exclusion of everyone having local protections. Your firewall is under your control and you can make it as secure or unsecured as you want it.
If you want the cyberspace equivalent of a national army, you're just asking to have lots of power taken away from you and given to someone else. That being said, I think there is a case for prevention of nations attacking other nations en large, or 'war by other means'.
but carry it too far and you end up destroying the global feel of the internet - you'll end up with cyber borders as bad as our real borders - checkpoints you can't cross without 'your papers please'.
Except he was in a Bellanca Citabria. You can go higher, but you generally need oxygen above 12,500 feet or you start becoming an idiot.
He was dead on impact. Wouldn't have helped, except that it might have prevented him from being eaten.
There's no way he was looking for a land speed record location near there. It's one of the most mountainous areas in the country. he may have started in the flats of Nevada, but he went over one mountain range and was skimming the peaks of another when he went down.
I backpacked in and camped about 5 miles north of that spot last year at Thousand Island Lake. He crashed at 10,000 feet up, which is nearing the limits for a small plane with unpressurized cockpit. If you make a wrong move and don't manage your energy right, you're dead, and there's nowhere to land safely. Likely it was too late by the time he realized he was in it too far and wasn't going to get back out.
The scenery up there is spectacular though, about a mile from his crash site is the Minarets and Minaret Lake, one of many alpine lakes that dot the Sierra range. There are backpacking trails nearby, but not on that particular very steep mountain side.
Probably the most annoying side effect of digital tuners. It has to find the stream and begin to decode it. Your old TV changed channels instantly because it was an analog tuner with pre-set frequency decoding for each channel position. The TV did no thinking, it simply is looking at a different frequency on the receiver and de-modulating it into the CRT, and all of that happens at the speed of light.
Newer tuners are all digital, and while you generally get better picture quality even on analog channels, it has to capture the analog or digital transmission, decode it / encode it and then pass it on to the LCD display. Typically there's some 'start time' involved in this. I expect that particular feature will be a selling point to differentiate TVs in the future, once they've run out of other things and the tuner hardware becomes more powerful.
BEos and it's original hardware was the last, best hope for a solid, no B.S. modern computer that was re-designed from scratch for maximum performance with pre-emtpive multitasking.
I see it as a chicken and egg problem. The barrier to entry in the OS market is extremely tough because software manufacturers won't invest the time in porting their apps unless the hardware or OS is established, and that can't happen without the software. The OS market is well beyond it's infancy now, not that it's a good thing.
The way I see it, it would have to get much, much worse than it is now for companies like Adobe to say "hey, lets throw our weight behind this new OS/Platform." For example, if MS completely bungled Windows 7, or whatever they are calling it these days. Two failed OS's in a row, and maybe it will finally make a dent in their market share. And I don't much like apple because their hardware prices remain artifically high, due to them being the sole provider for both OS and hardware. It doesn't help that MS also makes the world standard of office suites. They will always push their own OS with it first.
The competitiveness of the PC hardware market is excellent, and many previously frustrating compatiblity issues have gone away with the advent of newer motherboards and slot standards, narrowing the hardware quality control and consistency between PC hardware and Mac hardware.
PC hardware with a new OS would be great. Apple understandibly wants to control the hardware that Mac OSX runs on, because it's much easier to assure qualtiy and provide support that way. But that support comes at a cost. What we need is an OS that runs on generic hardware that is written from scratch for lean performance, by neither of those two vendors.
Err, re-sizable swap FILE, sorry. typo.
My later Amigas typically had a boot time of 10 seconds. Full blown AmigaOS on an internal HD on the A3000. I miss them dearly.
We've managed to stav off the usefulness of moore's law by creating the world's worst software to run on them.
It's not fair to judge modern systems with those older ones however; we ask a lot more of our software and our GUI's than we once did. But there is no excuse in the way that windows configures itself by default, it sets itself up for failure by having a re-sizable swap partition on the main OS partition.
When I install Windows on a new PC, I always create 3 partitions: An inner partition of 5 - 10 GB for a fixed size swap file only, then an OS partition, then an applications partition, and defrag regularly. I can keep my machines going for many years without much performance degradation in this manner.
Even if you are scrupulous, bad software and bad uninstall jobs will eventually bloat out your system a little bit.
A little common sense goes a long way, unfortunately those who do not deal with computers for a living aren't going to know these little tips and tricks, and will continue to be frustrated. OS manufacturers, in particular windows need to set up a default OS install for success, not failure. Software manufacturers need to create very clean installs and uninstall routines. Unfortunately this is not always possible in the OS environment. It's a joint effort.
The tin-foil hatters will think that M$ is doing this on purpose so people will feel compelled to upgrade more frequently, but I don't really give them that much conniving intelligence.
--Mike
I think they saw the sucess of the eposodic half life releases and went with that. You can shorten the time between releases and keep the genre fresh without the fans having to wait five years.
The Valve folks have admitted that the half life episodes are basically HL3 when put together, and done like that for the reasons stated above. I have enjoyed playing the episodes as they come out, and for those who aren't playing them, you can be sure there will be a nicely priced special with all three episodes run back to back as a single game.
With the HL2 episodes, each one is $20. It will be interesting to see what the Starcraft games end up costing. It sounds like the Starcraft games will be much broader than the short HL episodes, in that case they would be justified in charging more for each one. It doesn't matter how many games they put out, I will pay for a good game, as long as the price is relevant to the amount of gameplay you get out of it.
has anyone tried running XP with no swap, playing games, etc? Do you even need it for photoshop, since it has it's own scratch files that you can define?
what I always do is partition a new disk with a small inner partition, and put nothing but the windows swap file there. Since it's the fastest part of the disk it seems to make sense. Then I have the windows system partition, and then a program files partition. This seems to prevent excessive disk seek, and XP systems I build are still zippy a few years later.
I also make the swap file a fixed size, and yes I use that old rule of thumb of double the RAM, since no one has given a good reason NOT to. Although it would be great just to not use a swap file, but I hear Windows likes to have one, even if it has plenty of RAM.
With Photoshop, I created an inner partition on my RAID just for Pshop scratch disks.
I am glad to hear that he is broad minded enough to include Autoduel, which breaks from the traditional fantasy theme.
For a long time I thought that Ultima V was the best Ultima ever made. Then I met someone else who shared that opinion and then knew that I may not be crazy. Ultima IV was also not far behind, or at least it's equal. That's probably why a group of people went through great pains to recreate Ultima V using the dungeon seige engine. (see this link for info.)
A lot of the other games mentioned I remember playing on the C=64, Amiga, Apple II and PC.
Another good one is Sentinel Planets. That was a hybrid space combat / planetary exploration game with EGA graphics on the PC. Probably one of the first PC games that was vaguely well done.
I do disagree with the assessment of Diablo. It sounds to me like he turns a nose up at diablo because it emphasizes action more than the roleplaying aspect. In comparison to his favorite, Baldurs Gate, it is a completely different game. Personally, I enjoy the more action based games myself, mostly due to a lack of time and brain power to want to do anything else after a long work day. Just a sign of getting older I suppose. The Diablo games and Starcraft are the perfect balance. You can jump in, have a good game and put it away for a while.
Good times...
Yep, commodore didn't need any help running itself into the ground, between Irving Gould and the caustic atmosphere created by Jack Tramiel that was not sustainable past the initial success of the C=64.
I owned and used heavily every single model of Amiga released to the united states, and wound up in the effects industry as a result. The amount of stuff that was possible on that machine compared to all others at the time was astounding. Thank you Jay Miner and also Newtek.
Anyway, despite the numerous failings of Microsoft Products, you can't argue with success. Success in this case came with a huge compromise to quality, but later OSs such as Win2k and WinXP were actually quite stable and usable, warts and all. Sure, there were many better and much more pure OS's out there (I would like to have seen BEOS take off, especially in combination with the BEOS hardware) but the chicken and egg problem came into play...users say great platform but where's the software? Software developers: We'll port our software when people adopt the platform. In a mature industry it's hard to overcome inertia. If the Amiga had been handled correctly in 1986, it had the chance to be a serious contender.
But things are the way they are and life goes on. At least we have moore's law in processor speed to make up for the horrendous inefficiencies and bloat in Microsoft's OSs. Lets hope their next OS takes a different direction than Vista, by defaulting to a light footprint unless you want to add to it.
till one of these giant datacenters has an electrical fault like the one last weekend, and instead of 9,000 servers, it's 90,000 servers gone at once...
I live in the Edwards Air Force Base restricted air space, so we here many sonic booms in any given week, mostly from small fighter jets. In every instance the double boom is clearly audible, unless it's a tail-less spacecraft like SpaceShipOne. Whenever we hear a single boom, it is blasting going on at the nearby CalPortland Cement Plant limestone quarry or the gold mine.
Sometimes the booms are so loud the windows shake and things rattle around. We all love it because that's why we're here. But reducing the boom signature is an important area of research, so 'normal' folks can have supersonic airliners going overhead without disturbing their chiuahua's sleep patterns. That's why the concord only flew ocean routes. It would be nice to have supersonic transport between LA and New York.
--Mike
The difference between a flying car and a roadable airplane is that a roadable airplane is more airplane than car. It is designed to land and get you a short distance to a nearby destination at relatively slow speeds. It is also more delicate on the ground than a regular car. The upside is that as an airplane, its functionality is mostly preserved. The concept of a Roadable Airplane is closer to the truth as far as what will actually work.
;)
Building roadable airplanes is all about minimizing the weight sacrifice in adding the extra stuff it takes to fold the wings and make it steer and propel itself down the road. It's a very tough compromise. Aircraft engines are designed to run at fixed RPMs, they are not suitable for driving a transmission. Thus you're either adding a very small second engine or using a hydraulic motor or something similar. Again, more weight.
Beware prototypes that show very fancy automatic folding wings and other gadgetry - they are likely to never be practical in real life due to the added weight. The goal is to keep it simple and light.
There has been a problem in the industry of folks overpromising and under-delivering. It's a difficult problem that won't be solved with Popular Science cover art. It's easy to dismiss roadable airplanes as fantasy, but it's not an insurmountable engingeering problem, it just requires a lot of difficult work. It's been done before for real (Molt Taylor Aerocar) and it will be done again.
But yes, in the mean time, it's ok to continue to say "Where's my flying car?!?!?!"
--M
Sounds like a Strongbad Email waiting to happen.
Sometimes people are very careless about their trash. Notice the WTC plans that showed up in the dumpster trawled by the homeless guy the other day.
Dumpster diving has become both an art, a business and industrial espionage.
Also, it's quite likely that a programmer just took them home after an office cleaning or cancelled project or mass-layoff.
Good find. My first job in HS was at Atari playtesting video games for the Tengen system. (I knew someone who worked there as a 'game councelor' on their help line, a fellow Amiga fanatic, ironically)
It's not surprising that the roms turned up there - it's close to Milpitas. Usually I say there's nothing more to be had at flea markets - all the vendors these days are selling various combinations of the same grey market goods from Asia...but every now and then I guess there's still a gem.
It would be nice to see a blanket or low cost system for amateur short form video makers that post to YouTube and the likes. It would allow people who make AMVs and other short videos to use commercial music, so long as the videos are not sold directly for profit. Websites like YouTube would be allowed to host them (and make money off of advertising) in exchange for this. Perhaps a low blanket fee paid for by the ISP, or paid per individual per use. (but it would have to be very reasonable.)
Right now it is impossible for the average joe to license a Bon Jovi song for his home-made video. The industry is missing out on some cash flow and great publicity by not looking at this market.
--M
I think it should be permanently 'sprung forward' so we get more light in the evening. Otherwise useless to us non-morning people. Bah! (image of Catbert holding rolled up newspaper)
I took one out last week with a horizontal saw with a fine pitch blade for cutting hard metal.
I sawed directly through the middle of the platter, cutting through the motor. It made a very neat cutaway study. Might make some art with it, dunno. It was also fun to watch.
This is probably the most aggrivating thing about American consumer DSL and cable connections.
The internet was never designed to be a one way street.
Yea. They're only poor quality because people were only trying to surpass their current playback rate. If they had said before the original video was being stored, people would have run higher data rates and resolutions. Sigh.
That would be nice as well. People upload longer videos anyway, they just split them up and it's real annoying to have to deal with that. I think they're trying to prevent lots of people uploading full length programs. Hollyweird probably likes that too since that makes it harder to upload full length TV shows. Not that I'd want to watch anything of value at such crap resolution, and honestly, for more than 10 minutes at a stretch. ;) But introduce higher quality, and I think longer format programs would do better.
More access rarely results in more, better videos. Like anything else, a few good ones rise to the top. Fortunately, we don't have to watch the crappy ones.